An Open Letter to Christy Clark Dear Christy Clark, I am one of the half a million students who now find themselves with a lot of free time on their hands. I have used this time to educate myself and as I read about the strike and am most appalled to find that your governing style is similar to that of Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI, as you spend taxpayers money on pointless self-indulgence (such as ad campaigns and extravagant raises to yourself and your employees). Our government has half a billion dollars to spend putting a roof on BC Place and you gave a 60% raise to your deputy chief of staff boosting his salary from a cap of $144,000 to $230,000 (one of many raises you have given your aids), and yet you say we have no money to invest in smaller classes, special needs support or hiring more specialized teachers whom can help every child to reach their full potential. In the province of BC our government spends 1000 dollars less per student than the national average. In one of your many similar speeches you say, and I quote, “It’s just not right, I don’t think, to demand a 5,000 dollar signing bonus”. I find this quote particularly interesting because the signing bonus proposed by the teachers to make up for a 0% salary increase since 2010 was originally suggested by the government itself. You also say that the teachers’ demands are simply not fair to taxpayers however, you currently plan to spend 12 million dollars a day and 60 million dollars a week with your 40-dollars-a-day payment scheme which if anything can only serve to prolong the strike, when you could be putting this money towards ending the strike, there are more significantly more students to pay than there are teachers. To quote Jim Iker, the teachers’ union leader, “the BC government has not moved in any meaningful way for months. In fact, they have not added a single new dollar to their proposal to improve learning conditions for students since October 2013”. Meaning that you have made no significant attempts towards negotiating what you call “the issue that is most vital to the future”. While public school funding dwindles, up to 50 per cent of funding for so-called independent schools comes from taxpayers. Why are the people of British Columbia paying for schools in which only 11% of students from Kindergarten to grade 12 are attending, even after the results of a BCSPEA opinion survey of 2010 found that 65% of respondents disagreed with the provincial government’s notion to continue funding private schools with public funds? Another issue I feel is unfair to taxpayers is your governments’ repeated appeal of the Supreme Court of Canada’s ruling. In 2002 the government passed legislation that removed hundreds of clauses related to class size and class composition, while prohibiting these issues from being bargained in the future. Not only has the court ruled that you violated teachers charter rights but that you provoked the strike during a previous round of bargaining. Christy Clark, if you truly cared about the 200 schools closed, and the students of British Columbia currently not in school, where they should be, you would not have appealed the Supreme Court of Canada (twice). You would not be using taxpayer money to pay for the appeals, you would be moving forward to right your wrongs towards the students and to the teachers. If you accept the teachers request for ending the strike through binding arbitration (as 99.4% of 30,669 teachers have voted for), this can all be put behind us. Sincerely, A concerned grade 12 student
Posted on: Fri, 12 Sep 2014 00:10:15 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015